All Rise...

The Charge

Making the invisible visible.

Opening Statement

The first season of Time Warp, the popular Discovery Channel show,
makes its way to Blu-Ray, showcasing all manner of high-speed camera and
slow-motion eye candy. Time Warp: Season One (Blu-Ray) is sure to delight
those looking for compelling visuals, but the enjoyment factor of the show
itself leaves much to be desired.

Facts of the Case

Explore the hidden world with Jeff Lieberman and Matt Kearney as they reveal
events that happen much too quickly or too slowly to be perceived by our senses.
With cutting-edge slow-motion cameras, Jeff and Matt capture the everyday world
around us, and some radical and startling demonstrations of human endurance and
performance—and unlock the secrets of motion itself. This is Time
Warp.

Time Warp: Season One (Blu-Ray) contains all twenty episodes (plus
the pilot as a bonus feature) spread across two Blu-Ray discs, listed below
along with the subjects of interest shot in slow-motion:

The Evidence

Time Warp is a drunken MIT student's technological wet dream; a
Jackass-inspired quasi-scientific exploration of nonsensical events with
ultra-high speed cameras. Ever want to put butane lighters in a blender? How
about breathe fire? Shoot your buddy with paintballs? Or punch a guy in the
face? Take it to the next level by videotaping it all! It is, after all, the
very essence of the Internet generation, especially the parts where people get
horribly hurt. Entire video memes are created this way. Well, Time Warp
ups the ante with the application of slow motion, allowing every freakish detail
to be shown. Why? It's for the same reason that Johnny Knoxville and friends
strap ice blocks on their feet and roller skate down a hill, friends…just
for kicks. Drunken, drunken kicks.

At first glance a science documentary, Time Warp is more about making
your eyes go agog than stimulating your brain. There's science at work here, but
none easily accessible; outside of the "ooh" factor in seeing everyday
events slowed down to ridiculous speeds, there really is zero education going
on. There is no great purpose, no dialogue or discussion to the events, no
justification for breaking out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
expensive video technology, save for Beavis and Butthead-style chortling and
guffawing over the results. There's so much potential here in Time Warp,
but with no judicial application of restraint or greater purpose, dudes
inevitably do what dudes do when they get a video camera…they film their
buddies getting shot with a taser. In slow motion, dude! Time Warp was
picked up by the Discovery Channel, but it could have easily found a home on
MTV.

Speaking of the Discovery Channel, it's difficult to discuss Time
Warp without comparing it directly to another show on the same network,
MythBusters, which is probably something that bugs the heck out of the
Time Warp folks. Ultra high-speed camera footage found great audience
appeal on the myth-smashing show—so why not take that one part and make it
the entire focus of a show? Time Warp even borrows a near-identical
format and narrative style, slapping a jocular voiceover atop every sequence
imaginable, dropping buzzwords and faux-dramatic gravitas. The comparisons get
even uglier by the Discovery Channel airing Time Warp directly beside
episodes of MythBusters, suggesting that even the network feels the shows
are simpatico. These are dangerous comparisons for Time Warp, because no
matter how you slice it, Time Warp is the inferior product.

Say what you will about the scientific method at work in MythBusters,
there's always a method to the madness. The high-speed camera footage, while
always impressive, is almost always a means to an end—a record of tested
events for analysis to achieve a goal. How scientific that goal ends up being
(blowing stuff up) is arguable, but in Time Warp, the ends don't justify
the means, because there's no purpose to it beyond the simple art of the
high-speed camera capture. The moments when we see the footage are dramatic and
gripping, and the opportunity to observe the events in slow motion often
acquires an ethereal beauty about it. Problem is, we get about a minute of
footage per episode of Time Warp, and the rest of the show is a time
waste of magnanimous proportions.

The idea of the show in of itself, of reveling in the beauty of high-speed
footage, is sound, but so much dishonesty, deception, and self-importance goes
into filling the gaps around these bits of footage that Time Warp feels
leaden and wholly unwatchable. There is intellectual dishonesty at work here at
such a profound level here that it gives me a headache. One cannot argue that
Time Warp captures some truly jawdropping sequences of pure aesthetic
beauty, artful capturing of explosions, of destruction and human endurance
slowed down to impossible levels. But then, as if insecure about the
transparency of its own motivations, Time Warp tacks on the
aforementioned narrator, who constantly tries to psyche up audiences as to the
incredible groundbreaking world-shattering stunning scientific merit of these
experiments. Slow-motion shots, pieces of art in their own right, are sped up
and slowed down obnoxiously, rewound and played backwards at random like a
five-year-old kid at an editing board playing with the big black knob. Sound
effects are pasted atop the footage, as if audiences are unprepared at seeing
explosions or destruction with the appropriate crashing or smashing sound
accompanying it. The slow-motion footage is constantly (and dramatically)
referred to as "warp time," a meaningless buzzword certain to give
Stephen Hawking fits from his wheelchair every time he hears it.

For a show that promises science and profundity at every turn, none is
delivered, not even a morsel. Every second spend watching Time Warp is a
struggle between wanting to see the next bit of interesting high-speed footage,
and weathering the 20 minutes of filler and padding stuck in-between that seems
so intent on insulting your intelligence.

The 1080i presentation is handsome for a television show, lacking the detail
and color saturation one would expect from a feature film, but still offering up
impressive levels of detail and skin tones. The high-speed footage has an
impressive level of fidelity, and considering how tens many tens of thousands of
frames are whizzing by, it darn well better. Blu-Ray is absolutely the format to
be seeing this kind of amazing footage in. I fully admit to being taken in by
the charm of the show during stunning sequences of macrocosmic beauty, like
water rivulets and droplets cascading, soap bubbles popping in elegant slow
motion, archery arrows flying, items being frozen in liquid nitrogen—all
captured perfectly. Some sequences exhibit fantastic detail, while others are
full of grain and noise, no doubt heavily affected by ambient lighting. Outdoor
sequences are the finest looking, where the color saturation wakes up and the
image looks natural and vibrant.

The disc includes a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 presentation, and while the
lossless codec support is appreciated, the fidelity is largely wasted here,
though through no fault of the show itself. Most of the slow-motion footage is
video only, so there's nothing to record in that sense—all we get is a
center channel dialogue-centric mix with little rear channel activity save for
some swooshing special effects added during the "time warp" segments.
For a documentary-style television show with audio recorded live, this is about
as clear and simple of a presentation as one could hope for. Your home theater
won't even break a sweat.

To be perfectly accurate, there are no extras included on this disc. The
packaging suggests that the inclusion of the pilot episode should constitute
this set's lone offering…but we're smarter than that, right?

The Rebuttal Witnesses

I've been pretty hard on Time Warp, but I'm bothered by the bar being
set so uncomfortably low. Time Warp is a show about recreating Internet
memes and YouTube videos with gigantic, expensive video cameras, about punching
dudes in the face and throwing water balloons in slow motion. Anyone who spends
thirty seconds watching it realizes this, but the show seems in denial about it.
Spending thirty seconds vaguely discussing the physics behind the water balloon
throw in a 22-minute episode doesn't constitute a scientific documentary any
more than a Looney Tunes cartoon.

A little honesty would go a long way here. I'd be much happier with Time
Warp coming clean, dropping the poor pretence at exploration and science and
just coming out of the closet. No science, no hype-man narrator, no flimsy
pretence at making things unnecessarily science-fictional—just two dudes
with a high-speed camera, creating big-budget versions of YouTube Internet video
memes, and laughing at how awesome they are afterwards.

Closing Statement

An interesting idea poorly executed, Time Warp is not the finest of
Discovery Channel shows. However, the attention-grabbing and gimmicky appeal of
its high-speed footage is hard to challenge on the basis of sheer wow factor.
This goes double for Blu-Ray, because if you're going to see the show, Time
Warp: Season One (Blu-ray) is absolutely the way to do it. The show itself
suffers from a horrible narrator, a clumsy format, and poor editing, but it's
hard to deny the aesthetic beauty of watching high-speed footage in glorious
high definition.

The Verdict

It may lack intellectual merit, but Time Warp is undeniably nifty at
times, especially on Blu-Ray. Not guilty…but just barely.